Welcome to the second Poetry Upstairs at The Melville Centre!
Tuesday 31st May 7pm £5 Entry
Norman Jope (Plymouth) Melisande Fitzsimmons (Plymouth) Mike Jenkins (Merthyr)
Please contact us to register your place (you must book in advance), then pay on the door as usual.
To register, email info@melvillecentre.org.uk and send your full name/s and telephone contact numbers, or call Emma on 01873 853167.
We regret we cannot admit anyone who has not registered beforehand, as we need to know numbers ahead of the evening.
Norman Jope was born in 1960 in Plymouth, where he lives again after residence in a number of other locations (most recently Bristol and Budapest).
He has published For the Wedding-Guest (Stride, 1997), The Book of Bells and Candles (Waterloo Press, 2009), Dreams of the Caucasus (Shearsman Books, 2010)
and Aphinar (Waterloo Press, 2012) and his poetry has appeared in many magazines and webzines in the UK, Europe, North America and Australasia.
With the late Ian Robinson, he co-edited the anthology In the Presence of Sharks: New Poetry from Plymouth (Phlebas, 2006).
He was the editor of the literary and cultural magazine Memes and co-edited a Critical Companion to Richard Berengarten (Salt, 2011; reissued by Shearsman in 2016);
critical work has appeared in Tears in the Fence, Terrible Work, Stride and other outlets. He currently works as an administrator in higher education.
Mélisande Fitzsimons writes a modern conversational poem that is alive to changing states and conditions. The reader is taken on a journey through narrative obsessions that moves from the ordinary to the extraordinary in its exposition of what it is to live as a migrant and internationalist. This is essentially the poetry of exile in Brexit Britain where ‘skin mutates into membrane, too sticky to breathe’… ‘with barbed wire rasps / scratching at the whitewash’ mixed with an otherworldliness, bodies being cleansed, and family stories redolent of home. Her collections include A Language of Spies (Crafty Little Press 2019) and Life Here is Full of Tomorrows (Leafe Press 2021).
Mike Jenkins is an award-winning Welsh poet and author.
He is widely published and is much in demand for his lively performances and writing workshops. He has performed at the Hay Festival and the Aldeburgh Poetry Festival and
has read and tutored at Ty Newydd, the National Writers’ Centre for Wales.
Mike frequently appears on radio and television and is known among Cardiff City football fans as the club’s ‘unofficial poet’.
